- The ABC of National Liberation Movements
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1969
A war is politics continued by other, that is forcible, means. Our attitude toward a war must be congruent with our attitude toward the politics of which it is the continuation. This determines our principled position on the question of whether to support or oppose a given war - not primarily our opinion of the men, the government or the class leading the war, not our opinion of their past or present crimes. The latter considerations will be very relevant to how we support or oppose a war, but not to whether we do.
- Adventures in Marxism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1999
Marshall Berman explores and rejoices in the emancipatory potential of Marxism.
- Anarchism vs. Marxism: A few notes on an old theme
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1978
Anarchist critiques of Marxism typically reveal a lack of knowledge of what Karl Marx actually wrote, resulting in sterile denunciations of a straw-man opponent.
- Autonomist Marxism Course Outline
Resource Type: Article
An outline of currents of thought and readings related to autonomist Marxism. The term autonomis" is used to designate a dominan characteristic of this particular tradition of radical political thought: the emphasis on the autonomy of the working class in its struggle against capital as well as on the autonomy of various groups of workers vis a vis others of their class.
- Bakunin vs. Marx
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1978
The anarchist-Marxist split started with Bakunin, who systematically misrepresented Marx's positions.
- Beyond the Fragments
Feminism and the Making of Socialism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1980
A call for various fractions of the left to unite and work for a socialism through grass-roots activism.
- Break Their Haughty Power
Resource Type: Website
Articles on capitalism, socialism, and revolution, from a left-Marxist perspective.
- Das Capital, Volume 1
A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1890
Marx's great work sets out to grasp and portray the totality of the capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that emerges from it. He describes and connects all its economic features, together with its legal, political, religious, artistic, philosophical and ideological manifestations.
- The Civil War in France
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1871
Written by Karl Marx as an address to the General Council of the International, with the aim of distributing to workers of all countries a clear understanding of the character and world-wide significance of the heroic struggle of the Paris Communards of 1871 and their historical experience to learn from.
- Common Sense for Hard Times
The Power of the Powerless to Cope with Everyday life and Transform Society in The Nineteen Seventies
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1976
Presents a vision of society as it is and as it could be. Putting the problems of contemporary daily life in historical perspective, it reveals that they have their roots in the way our society is organized, and thereby enables us to re-examine our own situation and experience.
- The Communist Manifesto
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1848
Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as the theoretical and practical platform of the Communist League, a workers' association.
- Connexions Library Spotlight
Featured Resources in the Connexions Library
Resource Type: Website
Published: 2012
- Diemer, Ulli
Connexipedia Article
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2010
Canadian socialist publisher, writer, and archivist.
- Ecosocialist Groups & Websites
Resource Type: Website
A list of ecosocialist websites and groups.
- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1852
Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon between December 1851 and March 1852. The "Eighteenth Brumaire" refers to November 9, 1799 in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- the day the first Napoleon Bonaparte had made himself dictator by a coup d'etat. Marx traces how the conflict of different social interests manifest themselves in the complex web of political struggles, and in particular the contradictory relationships between the outer form of a struggle and its real social content.
- The Enemy of Nature
The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2007
We live in and from nature, but the way we have evolved of doing this is about to destroy you. Capitalism and its by-products -- imperialism, war, neoliberal globalization, racism, poverty, and the destruction of community -- are all playing a part in the destruction of our ecosystem.
- Facing Reality
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1974
Inspired by the October 1956 Hungarian workers' revolution against Stalinist oppression, as well as the U.S. workers' "wild-cat" strikes (against capital and the union bureaucracies), the authors looked ahead to the rise of new mass emancipatory movements by African Americans as well as anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist currents in Africa and Asia. Virtually alone among the radical texts of the time, Facing Reality also rejected modern society's mania for "conquering nature," and welcomed women's struggles "for new relations between the sexes."
- Fictitious Capital for Beginners
Imperialism, 'Anti-Imperialism', and the Continuing Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2007
Rosa Luxemburg's framework enabled her to see how capitalism could ultimately destroy society - barbarism, in her words, or the 'mutual destruction of the contending classes' as the Communist Manifesto put it in 1847 - by being required to turn more and more to primitive accumulation and non-reproduction, a prophecy we see materializing before our eyes today.
- The Grundrisse
Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1973
Marx wrote this huge manuscript as part of his preparation for what would become A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (published in 1859) and Capital (published 1867). The series of seven notebooks were rough-drafted by Marx, chiefly for purposes of self-clarification, during the winter of 1857-8. The manuscript became lost in circumstances still unknown and was first effectively published, in the German original, in 1953.
- Insurgent Notes
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
A journal of communist theory and practice.
- Introduction to Capital
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1932
Marx's book on capital, like Plato's book on the state, like Machiavelli's Prince and Rousseau's Social Contract, owes its tremendous and enduring impact to the fact that it grasps and articulates, at a turning point of history, the full implications of the new force breaking in upon the old forms of life. All the economic, political, and social questions, upon which the analysis in Marx's Capital theoretically devolves, are today world-shaking practical issues, over which the real-life struggle between great social forces, between states and classes, rages in every corner of the earth.
- Karl Marx
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1938
It is the purpose of this book to restate the most important principles and contents of Marx's social science in the light of recent historical events and of the new theoretical needs which have arisen under the impact of those events. In so doing we shall deal throughout with the original ideas of Marx himself rather than with their subsequent developments brought about by the various 'orthodox' and 'revisionist, dogmatic and critical, radical and moderate schools of the Marxists on the one hand, and their more or less violent critics and opponents on the other hand.
- Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume I: State and Bureaucracy
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1977
A wide-ranging and thorough exposition of Marx's views on democracy.
- Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume II: The Politics of Social Classes
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1978
Draper ranges through the development of the thought of Marx and Engels on the role of classes in society.
- Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume III: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1986
Hal Draper examines how Marx and Marxism dealt with the issue of dictatorship in relation to the revolutionary use of force and repression, particularly as this debate has centered on the use of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat." Draper strips away the layers of misinterpretation and misinformation that have accumulated over the years to show what Marx and Engels themselves meant by the term.
- Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume IV: Critique of Other Socialisms
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1990
Much of Karl Marx's most important work came out of his critique of other thinkers, including many socialists who differed significantly in their conceptions of socialism. Draper looks at these critiques to illuminate what Marx's socialism was, as well as what it was not.
- Leading Principles of Marxism: A Restatement
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1937
Marx's study of society is based upon a full recognition of the reality of historical change. Marx treats all conditions of existing bourgeois society as changing, ie more exactly, as conditions in the process of being changed by human actions. Bourgeois society is not, according to Marx, a general entity which can be replaced by another stage in a historical movement. It is both the result of an earlier phase and the starting point of a new phase, of the social class war which is leading to a social revolution.
- Left Communist Groups & Websites
Resource Type: Website
A list of left communist websites and groups.
- Let's Stop Kidding Ourselves About the NDP
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1989
Canadian socialists are terribly reluctant to give up their illusions about the NDP.
- Libertarian Socialist Groups & Websites in the Connexions Directory
Resource Type: Website
A list of libertarian socialist websites and groups.
- Rosa Luxemburg
A letter about Rosa Luxemburg's contribution to Marxism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2000
In a time when the socialist movement was evolving in directions increasingly removed from Marx's positions -- Social Democratic reformism on the one hand, and Leninist bureaucratic centralism on the other -- Luxemburg was the leading exponent of a Marxism in the spirit of Marx.
- Luxemburg versus Lenin
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1935
On many essential points the conceptions of Luxemburg differ from those of Lenin as day from night, or -- the same thing -- as the problems of the bourgeois revolution from those of the proletarian.
- Manifestos, Programs, Visions
Selected Manifestos - Political Statements - Programs
Resource Type: Website
Published: 2009
A selection of left manifestos, programs, poltical statements and visions from the 1600s to today.
- Marx Myths & Legends
Resource Type: Website
A critical reading of the work of Karl Marx now requires us to lay to one side the myths and legends which have obscured his ideas over the past one hundred and twenty years- distortions and misinterpretations to which perhaps no thinker has been more prone. In one sense, this is not difficult, because there is enough of his writing preserved, albeit in translation, for any of us to read Marx in his own words. Most however have been unwilling or unable to do this. The fifty volumes of the Marx-Engels Collected Works are forbidding, and when beginning as one almost inevitably does, with the received wisdom surrounding Marx’s name, there is much to discourage a reader from seriously taking on the task of understanding Marx. The aim of this project is thus to begin to challenge some of those myths in order to clear the way for a fresh reading of Marx that will hopefully be less prone to the distortions, misunderstandings and blatant falsehoods that have so far surrounded Marx. We believe that what Marx had to say remains of considerable relevance to an understanding of problems we face today, but that a reading of Marx now must maintain a critical caution which does not merely reproduce received ideas- positive or negative- about Marx’s work.
- Marxism and Freedom
From 1776 to Today
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1971
Dunayevskaya argues that Marx's theory is the generalisation of the instinctive striving of the proletariat for a new social order, a truly human society.
- Marxist Groups & Websites
Resource Type: Website
A list of Marxist websites and groups.
- The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1906
Luxemburg writes that "the mass strike in Russia [in 1905] has been realised not as means of evading the political struggle of the working-class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism. The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which mass strikes are the most important weapon, is, by the working people, and above all by the proletariat, conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the struggle for the emancipation of the working-class Marx and Engels first pointed out, and in opposition to anarchism fought for with all their might in the International."
- Multiculturalism or World Culture?
On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2000
Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
- The National Question
Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1976
In her penetrating analysis of nationalism, Rosa Luxemburg argues that the formula of "the right of nations to self-determination" is essentially not a political or programmatic guide to the nationality question, but only a means of avoiding that question.
- Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1904
Rosa Luxemburg's contribution to the debate within the Russian Social Democratic movement on party organization and democratic centralism. Luxemburg joins Trotsky in warning of the dangers inherent in centralism and argues against the concentration of power in a Central Committee. From a Socialist Revolutionary perspective Luxemburg puts forward compelling arguments against Lenin's conception of the revolutionary Party.
- Radical America - Wikipedia article
Connexipedia Article
Resource Type: Article
- Radical Digressions
Resource Type: Website
Published: 2010
Ulli Diemer's website/blog featuring comment from a radcial left-libertarian perspective.
- Radical Political Theory
Resources in the Connexions Library
Resource Type: Website
Books and articles on radical political thought in the Connexions Library.
- Radical Socialist Groups & Websites
Resource Type: Website
A list of radical socialist websites and groups.
- Rosa Luxemburg
Selected Political Writings
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1972
A selection of Rosa Luxemburg's writings which highlight her outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of revolutionary socialism.
- The Rosa Luxemburg Reader
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2004
A definitive one-volume collection of Luxemburg's writings.
- Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1982
Part I - Rosa Luxemburg as Theoretician, as Activist, as Internationalist. Part II - The Women's Liberation Movement as Revolutionary Force and Reason. Part III - Karl Marx: From Critic of Hegel to Author of Capital and Theorist of "Revolution in Permanence."
- Social Reform or Revolution
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1908
Rosa Luxemburg's attack on reformism.
- Socialisme ou Barbarie
Connexipedia Article
Resource Type: Article
A French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period which existed from 1948 until 1965. Socialisme ou Barbarie was critical of Leninism, rejecting the idea of a revolutionary party, and placing an emphasis on the importance of workers' councils, and saw the daily struggles of working people as creating the true content of socialism.
- Structuralism as Defense of the Bureaucratic Status Quo
A Dialectical Critique of Althusserian Theory
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1974
Althusserian theory is deeply conservative and puts obstacles in the way of seeing the truly revolutionary currents that exist in the modern world.
- Trotskyism and the vanguard party
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1974
One of the most consistent achievements of the Trotskyists over the years has been to drive people away from radical politics. The number of burned-out and alienated ex-Trotskyists greatly exceeds the number of active Trotskyists. Their transparently manipulative tactics in the organizations they infiltrate tend to drive ordinary members away, forever wary of anyone identified as a Trotskyist.
- The Two Souls of Socialism
Socialism from Above vs. Socialism from Below
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1970
It was Marx who finally brought the two ideas of Socialism and Democracy together, because he developed a theory which made the synthesis possible for the first time. The heart of the theory is this proposition: that there is a social majority which has the interest and motivation to change the system, and that the aim of socialism can be the education and mobilization of this mass-majority. This is the exploited class, the working class, from which comes the eventual motive-force of revolution. Hence a socialism-from-below is possible, on the basis of a theory which sees the revolutionary potentialities in the broad masses, even if they seem backward at a given time and place. Marxism came into being, in self-conscious struggle against the advocates of the Educational Dictatorship, the Savior-Dictators, the revolutionary elitists, the communist authoritarians, as well as the philanthropic dogooders and bourgeois liberals.
- The Unknown Dimension
European Marxism Since Lenin
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1972
The radical intellectual tradition of European post-Leninist Marxism, so different from the dogma of the orthodox leftist parties, is an unknowwn dimension. This anthology sets out to recover this Marxist tradition and to restore the centrality of Marxist revolutionary thought and practice.
- What is Libertarian Socialism?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1977
Revolution is a collective process of self-liberation: people and societies are transformed through their struggles for freedom and for a better world.
- Who Advocates Spontaneity?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1973
The working class can come to understand its power to act only by acting.
- Why I am a Marxist
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1935
For the Marxist, there is no such thing as 'Marxism' in general any more than there is a 'democracy' in general, a 'dictatorship' in general or a 'state' in general. There is only a bourgeois state, a proletarian dictatorship or a fascist dictatorship, etc. And even these exist only at determinate stages of historical development, with corresponding historical characteristics, mainly economic, but conditioned also in part by geographical, traditional, and other factors. With the deferent levels of historical development, with the different environments of geographical distribution, with the well-known differences of creed and tendency among the various Marxist schools, there exist, both nationally and internationally, very different theoretical systems and practical movements which go by the name of Marxism.
- Wobblies & Zapatistas
Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical Theory
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2008
Wobblies and Zapatistas offers readers an encounter between two generations and two traditions. Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic meet in dialogue in an effort to bring together the anarchist and Marxist traditions, to discuss the writing of history by those who make it, and to remind us of the idea that 'my country is the world'.
- Wood, Ellen Meiksins
Connexipedia Article
Resource Type: Article
Marxist scholar. (Born 1942).
- Writings on the Paris Commune
Resource Type: Book
Hal Draper's compilation of all the writings by Marx and Engels on the Paris Commune of 1871, when a working-class-led revolution took power and established a new type of state for the first time in the history of the world - temporarily, in one city.
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